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Certain uncertainty at Davos 2018

Investment business is opportunistic enough already, but new technologies superimpose the situation. There is a special term in English – shortism. It means ability to write the sentences using shortened slang words. This method is often used by gamers.

Every year, I tell my employees about plans for the next year and the next 5 years. Last December I had nothing certain to say about the plans, so I focused on the other things. I said that we had been entering an era of the Certain Uncertainty.

What is obvious to me is our future digital reality. The Digit will enter (has already entered) so intensively and quickly that we do not notice how it invades in the most part of our life. But what wouldhappen in particular and what steps we should take exactly – it is not clear.

Large scopes of data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robots: those were the plans I had described for us for the next 5 years. It is like painting with oil, but using very large touches. And in this regard, I set the tasks for my colleagues – not to plan, but to build up their own personal competence. It is all that helps us to adapt in a rapidly changing world. Study, study and study again.

Being inspired by the “digital” ideas, I have started to watch Davosevent in 2018. This year they promised to talk about a joint future in the borken World. In reality, 95 % of the topics of the current Forum are related to the Digital sphere. It is interesting that the leading part in this time played the women: all co-chairpersons of the forum – Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director, Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO, as well as Erna Solberg, Norwegian Prime Minister.

I heard the statements about lack of the natural resources and money capitals and about excess of labor resources. And all this is against the background of the development prospects of robotics and artificial intelligence. Someone used blockchain once again as a marketing gimmick for attracting new customers. And here we are! Shortism! This term was heard at Davos in another meaning: as a very rapidly shrinking horizon of rational economic forecasts.

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